The Occasional Observer

5 comments:

SheaHeyKid said...

I'm not sure I agree with the Brooks article, in that I don't think his arguments are specific to Romney. I think most of what he says generally applies to any Republican running in '08, since they are the incumbents and people are not pleased with Iraq. For a moment, let's assume the Dem candidate is Hillary. Are any republican voters really going to vote for her instead of Mitt b/c they think Mitt is too political and calculating, and not genuine enough? Doubtful. Hillary running as opponent all-but-guarantees votes for the Repub candidate.

There are really only three game-changers in my opinion. First, McCain is the only Republican candidate (IMO) that will actually steal votes from Dem and Independent voters. Second, if evangelicals can't bring themselves to vote for Mitt in general election and instead stay home, that's a problem. Third, if Bloomberg runs or sponsors someone as 3rd party, that's a problem.

1/02/2008 2:52 PM

SheaHeyKid said...

I think in analyzing any trend in voting public over the last few decades, and where are Reagan voters, one has to consider the impact of new news sources. It used to be you'd watch CBS, NBC, or ABC, plus your daily paper, and that was it. Now, you have Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, ... as well as the internet. I think this higher-accessibility of news probably contributes to more fluctuations in voter opinions leading up to polls and elections.

Looking more at Brooks:
Romney is astoundingly unpopular among young voters... I say this is irrelevant, since everyone knows young voters never turn out anyway.

Romney is also quite unpopular among middle- and lower-middle class voters. If it turns out that this is still true for middle-class when the alternative is Hillary then this is a problem.

If Romney is the general election candidate, he will face hostility from independent voters, who value authenticity. He will face hostility from Hispanic voters, who detest his new immigration positions. He will face great hostility in the media. Except for McCain, I think this applies to all Republican candidates.

But his biggest problem is a failure of imagination. He never really expands on why he thinks this is specific to Mitt, and in fact in subsequent paragraphs the points he makes are general to Republican party and ideas, not to Mitt. I agree that perhaps more than McCain and Huckabee, Romney has tried to feel out the popular position on certain issues. But on things like terrorism and finance he was very early to post policies on his website and commit to guarantees (e.g., Norquist tax pledge). Brooks really only seems to make a case against Republicans (The general public prefers Democratic approaches on health care, corruption, the economy and Iraq by double-digit margins. Republicans’ losses have come across the board, but the G.O.P. has been hemorrhaging support among independent voters.), not Mitt specifically.

1/02/2008 3:14 PM

Fredo said...

Rudy, McCain and Huck will out perform Mitt and Fred with hispanics.

I agree with much of what you say about Brooks criticisms of Romney as being more general to the GOP, which is why I focused in on that as the interesting part of his analysis.

The lack of imagination was tied directly to his overall thesis: Mitt has explicitly (3 legs) attempted to return to the Reagan coalition, while Huckabee has explicitly stated he's seeking to reinvent the Republican brand (Main St. vs. Wall St.).

I doubt the validity of one approach or the other can be quantitatively proven through argument, but I do think there is a case to make against the "tried and true" 3-legged stool approach that Romney is seeking to employ.

This year may, in fact, be a tipping point, after which a new set of ideas will reign supreme in the body politic. And the GOP may be forced to adapt or face minority status.

Then again, perhaps not.

At the crux of the matter is whether, as you seem to believe, dissatisfaction with the GOP is largely the result of our Iraq policy, and bad vibes towards W personally. Or whether, as I personally believe, there is a broader shift in voters' attitudes towards government spending and economic policy.

Shrinking tax rates cannot continue indefinitely, and while there is tremendous waste and also rich entitlement programs that need to be reformed and rooted out, the fedreal goverment does have a role to play in supporting infrastrucutre and maintaining US competitiveness in the era of globalization. "Shrinking the federal government" is no longer a panacea from most people's perspective (even those on the right), and "tax cut" is no longer seen as a universal win-win. I think that is the major difference between 2008 and 1980.

As with Terence Jeffrey in the NRO article I linked to in the next post, I believe that it is the FiCon wing of the party that is most in danger of losing their "agenda pushing" status. From their perspective, they should be somewhat assuaged by the fact that they are a victim of their own success.

1/02/2008 4:11 PM

ManBeast said...

My family had a good year in 2007. Thanks to the AMT, more than a quarter of my income went to the federal government. Add in State Income tax, Property taxes, Social Security, Sales taxes and I'm almost certain that will jump to over a third. I consider us comfortable, but certainly not wealthy. We live in the suburbs in a modest house, lease a minivan and a pickup truck. With our income level, you'd think we'd have been able to put a lot in savings. But, factor in a mortgage, day care for four days a week, two cars, and the general high cost of living in my area, I wonder where it all went.

I'm am utterly frustrated with the outrageous spending of all of our governments - local all the way up to federal. I don't feel anyone making decisions on how to spend tax revenue is doing it responsibly and I feel completely helpless to do anything about it. The only guy making this point strong enough IMHO is Ron Paul. I think there is going to be a new breed of Republicans or possibly a bolstering of the Liberatarian party. I'm might even go along for the ride.

--End Rant--

1/02/2008 5:55 PM

Fredo said...

MB,

If politics were all about message and not about the messenger, Paul would be in the 1st tier right now. Heck, he's the leading GOP candidates for fundraising in Q4 despite being a weak messenger.

Unfortunately, while I sympathize with your small government goals, I think the ship has sailed on the federalism/states rights crowd. Reagan was stymied by Congressional Dems and Newt was stymied by Bill.

Look around. The same party that once advocated things like eliminating the Dept. of Education entirely (under, say, Ronald Reagan), now are expanding the same departments they sought to eliminate 20 years ago (see "Child Left Behind Act, No"), and creating huge new entitlements (Medicare Part D).

The reality is, a meaningful further reduction in the tax burden can only be attained by shrinking government aggressively, and there are only 3 ways to do that:

1. Drastically cutting back the scope of Social Security.
2. Drastically cutting back the scope of Medicare.
3. Drastically cutting back military expenditures.

[see pg 10 of this:

"The Departments of Health and Human Services, and Defense, as well as the Social Security
Administration and interest on public debt, accounted for approximately three-fourths of the
Government’s total net costs in FY 2007."]

None of these 3 things are likely to happen in the near term. Social Security reform failed with conservatives in charge of the W.H., House, and Senate. And not just b/c of poor leadership. Rather, because those who want to protect benefits are a far more numerous and potent political force than than those who want reform.

Absent a meaningful reduction in the scope of entitlements of national defense spending, there is no way to shrink the government in a way that would enable further tax relief of any kind other than tinkering around the margins.

What this means to me is that, until the pendulum starts to swing again, conservatives better prepare themselves for years (and maybe decades) of fighting rear-guard actions against rapid increases in federal spending, rather than waste their time imagining we're on the offensive, with the opportunity to slash the federal government in any meaningful way. Overreaching merely leads to electoral losses, which just leads to the worst case scenarios being realized.

1/02/2008 8:08 PM